An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than a year ago, Amazon, specifically Amazon Web Services, flashed its stacks of cash as it announced it was buying up the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Wickr. AWS users could suddenly use Wickr's services, and some reporters speculated Amazon could have been trying to make a move in the increasingly crowded encrypted messaging space. That's much more unlikely now as Amazon announced Monday it was nixing its secure messaging app Wickr Me. The tech giant said that Wickr would instead be focused on business and public sector communications, specifically through AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise. The company will no longer allow registrations for Wickr Me after Dec. 31, and a year later, at the tail end of 2023, the app will be but a puff of smoke and a memory. Wickr was worth in the ballpark of $60 million when it was purchased, but just a few years ago Wickr was spouting off about its features that encrypted conference calls, which was a major evolution in the encrypted messaging space. Amazon's other messaging app, Chime, does videoconferencing without encryption. In September, Amazon finally added end-to-end encryption for the data sent to users through its Ring doorbells.

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Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Peter is an IT manager for a technology manufacturer that got hit with a Russian ransomware strain called "Zeppelin" in May 2020. He'd been on the job less than six months, and because of the way his predecessor architected things, the company's data backups also were encrypted by Zeppelin. After two weeks of stalling their extortionists, Peter's bosses were ready to capitulate and pay the ransom demand. Then came the unlikely call from an FBI agent. "Don't pay," the agent said. "We've found someone who can crack the encryption." Peter, who spoke candidly about the attack on condition of anonymity, said the FBI told him to contact a cybersecurity consulting firm in New Jersey called Unit 221B, and specifically its founder -- Lance James. Zeppelin sprang onto the crimeware scene in December 2019, but it wasn't long before James discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the malware's encryption routines that allowed him to brute-force the decryption keys in a matter of hours, using nearly 100 cloud computer servers. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, James said Unit 221B was wary of advertising its ability to crack Zeppelin ransomware keys because it didn't want to tip its hand to Zeppelin's creators, who were likely to modify their file encryption approach if they detected it was somehow being bypassed. This is not an idle concern. There are multiple examples of ransomware groups doing just that after security researchers crowed about finding vulnerabilities in their ransomware code. "The minute you announce you've got a decryptor for some ransomware, they change up the code," James said. But he said the Zeppelin group appears to have stopped spreading their ransomware code gradually over the past year, possibly because Unit 221B's referrals from the FBI let them quietly help nearly two dozen victim organizations recover without paying their extortionists. [...] The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects. "If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" [James and co-author Joel Lathrop wrote in a blog post]. "The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key." Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key. From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them. The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys. A more technical writeup on Unit 221B's discoveries (cheekily titled "0XDEAD ZEPPELIN") is available here.

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Fearing the possibility of encryption-cracking quantum computers, Quanta magazine reports that researchers are "scrambling to produce new,'post-quantum' encryption scheme." Earlier this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology revealed four finalists in its search for a post-quantum cryptography standard. Three of them use "lattice cryptography" — a scheme inspired by lattices, regular arrangements of dots in space. Lattice cryptography and other post-quantum possibilities differ from current standards in crucial ways. But they all rely on mathematical asymmetry. The security of many current cryptography systems is based on multiplication and factoring: Any computer can quickly multiply two numbers, but it could take centuries to factor a cryptographically large number into its prime constituents. That asymmetry makes secrets easy to encode but hard to decode.... A quirk of factoring makes it vulnerable to attack by quantum computers.... Originally developed in the 1990s, [lattice cryptography] relies on the difficulty of reverse-engineering sums of points... Of course, it's always possible that someone will find a fatal flaw in lattice cryptography... Cryptography works until it's cracked. Indeed, earlier this summer one promising post-quantum cryptography scheme was cracked using not a quantum computer, but an ordinary laptop. At a recent panel discussion on post-quantum cryptography, Adi Shamir (the S in RSA), expressed concern that NIST's proposed solutions are predominantly based on lattice cryptography. "In some sense, we are putting all eggs in the same basket, but that is the best we have.... "The best advice for young researchers is to stay away from lattice-based post-quantum crypto," Shamir added. "What we really lack are entirely different ideas which will turn out to be secure. So any great idea for a new basis for public-key cryptography which is not using lattices will be greatly appreciated."

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Thursday the Kudelski Group's cybersecurity division released "a tool for Linux that allows creation of multiple hidden volumes on a storage device in such a way that it is very difficult, even under forensic inspection, to prove the existence of such volumes." "Each volume is encrypted with a different secret key, scrambled across the empty space of an underlying existing storage medium, and indistinguishable from random noise when not decrypted." Even if the presence of the Shufflecake software itself cannot be hidden — and hence the presence of secret volumes is suspected — the number of volumes is also hidden. This allows a user to create a hierarchy of plausible deniability, where "most hidden" secret volumes are buried under "less hidden" decoy volumes, whose passwords can be surrendered under pressure. In other words, a user can plausibly "lie" to a coercive adversary about the existence of hidden data, by providing a password that unlocks "decoy" data. Every volume can be managed independently as a virtual block device, i.e. partitioned, formatted with any filesystem of choice, and mounted and dismounted like a normal disc. The whole system is very fast, with only a minor slowdown in I/O throughput compared to a bare LUKS-encrypted disk, and with negligible waste of memory and disc space. You can consider Shufflecake a "spiritual successor" of tools such as Truecrypt and Veracrypt, but vastly improved. First of all, it works natively on Linux, it supports any filesystem of choice, and can manage up to 15 nested volumes per device, so to make deniability of the existence of these partitions really plausible. "The reason why this is important versus "simple" disc encryption is best illustrated in the famous XKCD comic 538," quips Slashdot reader Gaglia (in the original submission. But the big announcement from Kudelski Security Research calls it "a tool aimed at helping people whose freedom of expression is threatened by repressive authorities or dangerous criminal organizations, in particular: whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and activists for human rights in oppressive regimes. "Shufflecake is FLOSS (Free/Libre, Open Source Software). Source code in C is available and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or superior.... The current release is still a non-production-ready prototype, so we advise against using it for really sensitive operations. However, we believe that future work will sensibly improve both security and performance, hopefully offering a really useful tool to people who live in constant danger of being interrogated with coercive methods to reveal sensitive information.

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Here's the Guardian's report on new cryptographic techniques where "you can share data while keeping that data private" — known by the umbrella term "privacy-enhancing technologies" (or "Pets). They offer opportunities for data holders to pool their data in new and useful ways. In the health sector, for example, strict rules prohibit hospitals from sharing patients' medical data. Yet if hospitals were able to combine their data into larger datasets, doctors would have more information, which would enable them to make better decisions on treatments. Indeed, a project in Switzerland using Pets has since June allowed medical researchers at four independent teaching hospitals to conduct analysis on their combined data of about 250,000 patients, with no loss of privacy between institutions. Juan Troncoso, co-founder and CEO of Tune Insight, which runs the project, says: "The dream of personalised medicine relies on larger and higher-quality datasets. Pets can make this dream come true while complying with regulations and protecting people's privacy rights. This technology will be transformative for precision medicine and beyond." The past couple of years have seen the emergence of dozens of Pet startups in advertising, insurance, marketing, machine learning, cybersecurity, fintech and cryptocurrencies. According to research firm Everest Group, the market for Pets was $2bn last year and will grow to more than $50bn in 2026. Governments are also getting interested. Last year, the United Nations launched its "Pet Lab", which was nothing to do with the welfare of domestic animals, but instead a forum for national statistical offices to find ways to share their data across borders while protecting the privacy of their citizens. Jack Fitzsimons, founder of the UN Pet Lab, says: "Pets are one of the most important technologies of our generation. They have fundamentally changed the game, because they offer the promise that private data is only used for its intended purposes...." The emergence of applications has driven the theory, which is now sufficiently well developed to be commercially viable. Microsoft, for example, uses fully homomorphic encryption when you register a new password: the password is encrypted and then sent to a server who checks whether or not that password is in a list of passwords that have been discovered in data breaches, without the server being able to identify your password. Meta, Google and Apple have also over the last year or so been introducing similar tools to some of their products. The article offers quick explanations of zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and fully homomorphic encryption (which allows the performance of analytics on data by a second party who never reads the data or learns the result). And "In addition to new cryptographic techniques, Pets also include advances in computational statistics such as 'differential privacy', an idea from 2006 in which noise is added to results in order to preserve the privacy of individuals."

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Mark Zuckerberg, writing in a Facebook post: WhatsApp is far more private and secure than iMessage, with end-to-end encryption that works across both iPhones and Android, including group chats. With WhatsApp you can also set all new chats to disappear with the tap of a button. And last year we introduced end-to-end encrypted backups too. All of which iMessage still doesn't have.

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"A researcher from cloud and endpoint protection provider WithSecure has discovered an unpatchable flaw in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption," reports VentureBeat. "The flaw enables a hacker to infer the contents of encrypted messages." OME uses the electronic codebook (ECB) block cipher, which leaks structural information about the message. This means if an attacker obtains many emails they can infer the contents of the messages by analyzing the location and frequency of patterns in the messages and matching these to other emails. For enterprises, this highlights that just because your emails are encrypted, doesn't mean they're safe from threat actors. If someone steals your email archives or backups, and accesses your email server, they can use this technique to sidestep the encryption. The discovery comes shortly after researchers discovered hackers were chaining two new zero-day Exchange exploits to target Microsoft Exchange servers. WithSecure originally shared its discovery of the Office 365 vulnerability with Microsoft in January 2022. Microsoft acknowledged it and paid the researcher through its vulnerability reward program, but hasn't issued a fix.

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Mullvad VPN has discovered that Android leaks traffic every time the device connects to a WiFi network, even if the "Block connections without VPN," or "Always-on VPN," features is enabled. BleepingComputer reports: The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic. This behavior is built into the Android operating system and is a design choice. However, Android users likely didn't know this until now due to the inaccurate description of the "VPN Lockdown" features in Android's documentation. Mullvad discovered the issue during a security audit that hasn't been published yet, issuing a warning yesterday to raise awareness on the matter and apply additional pressure on Google. Android offers a setting under "Network & Internet" to block network connections unless you're using a VPN. This feature is designed to prevent accidental leaks of the user's actual IP address if the VPN connection is interrupted or drops suddenly. Unfortunately, this feature is undercut by the need to accommodate special cases like identifying captive portals (like hotel WiFi) that must be checked before the user can log in or when using split-tunnel features. This is why Android is configured to leak some data upon connecting to a new WiFi network, regardless of whether you enabled the "Block connections without VPN" setting. Mullvad reported the issue to Google, requesting the addition of an option to disable connectivity checks. "This is a feature request for adding the option to disable connectivity checks while "Block connections without VPN" (from now on lockdown) is enabled for a VPN app," explains Mullvad in a feature request on Google's Issue Tracker. "This option should be added as the current VPN lockdown behavior is to leaks connectivity check traffic (see this issue for incorrect documentation) which is not expected and might impact user privacy." In response to Mullvad's request, a Google engineer said this is the intended functionality and that it would not be fixed for the following reasons: - Many VPNs actually rely on the results of these connectivity checks to function, - The checks are neither the only nor the riskiest exemptions from VPN connections, - The privacy impact is minimal, if not insignificant, because the leaked information is already available from the L2 connection. Mullvad countered these points and the case remains open.

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Iran's government is trying to limit internet access, reports CNBC — while Iranians are trying a variety of technologies to bypass the blocks: Outages first started hitting Iran's telecommunications networks on September 19, according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks. Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they're seeing "curfew-style" network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night. Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years. As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps. On September 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site. By September 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said.... Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she's been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN. "This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they've developed to make the network extremely unreliable," she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network. Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added.... VPNs aren't the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or "proxies," on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a "relay" network around the world to obfuscate their activity.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The NYPD says it wants to reimagine its current police communication system and transition to encrypted messages by 2024, according to a recent amNY report confirmed by Gizmodo. While law enforcement has spent years fighting to make encryption less accessible for everyday people, police think they need a little more privacy. Critics worry a turn towards encryption by law enforcement could reduce transparency, hamstring the news media, and potentially jeopardize the safety of protestors looking to stay a step ahead. According to amNY, the NYPD's new plan would allow law enforcement officers discretion on whether or not to publicly disclose newsworthy incidents. That means the NYPD essentially would get to dictate the truth unchallenged in a number of potentially sensitive local stories. The report suggests police are floating the idea of letting members of the news media monitor certain radio transmissions through an NYPD-controlled mobile app. There's a catch though. According to the report, the app would send radio information with a delay. Users may also have to pay a subscription fee to use the service, the paper said. The NYPD confirmed its planning a "systems upgrade" in the coming years in an email to Gizmodo. "The NYPD is undergoing a systems upgrade that is underway and that will be complete after 2024," a spokesperson for the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information said. "This infrastructure upgrade allows the NYPD to transmit in either an encrypted or non-encrypted format," the NYPD said. "Some parts of the city have had the necessary equipment installed and the Department will begin testing the technology in these areas later this year. We are currently evaluating encryption best practices and will communicate new policies and procedures as we roll out this upgraded technology." The spokesperson claimed the department intends to listen to and consider the needs of the news media during the transition process. "The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post. "Cutting off the media from getting emergency transmissions represents the clearest regression of the NYPD policy of transparency in its history," New York Press Photographers Association President Bruce Cotler said in an interview with amNY. "We believe shutting down radio transmissions is a danger to the public and to the right of the public to know about important events." Gizmodo notes that New York joins a growing list of cities considering encrypting radio communications. "Denver, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Sioux City, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin have all moved to implement the technology in recent years."

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The head of WhatsApp has warned UK ministers that moves to undermine encryption in a relaunched online safety bill would threaten the security of the government's own communications and embolden authoritarian regimes. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Will Cathcart, who runs the Meta-owned messaging app, insisted that alternative techniques were available to protect children using WhatsApp, without having to abandon the underlying security technology that safeguards its more than 2bn users. The UK's bill, which the government argues will make the internet safer, has become a focus of global debate over whether companies such as Google, Meta and Twitter should be forced to proactively scan and remove harmful content on their networks. Tech companies claim it is not technically possible for encrypted messaging apps to scan for material such as child pornography without undermining the security of the entire network, which prevents anyone -- including platform operators -- from reading users' messages. Cathcart said the UK's ultimate position on the issue would have a global impact. "If the UK decides that it is OK for a government to get rid of encryption, there are governments all around the world that will do exactly the same thing, where liberal democracy is not as strong, where there are different concerns that really implicate deep-seated human rights," he said, citing Hong Kong as a potential example.

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"Major VPN services have shut down service in India, as there is no way to comply with a new law without breaching their own privacy protection standards," reports 9to5Mac. "The law also applies to iCloud Private Relay, but Apple has not yet commented on its own plans." The Wall Street Journal reports: Major global providers of virtual private networks, which let internet users shield their identities online, are shutting down their servers in India to protest new government rules they say threaten their customers' privacy [...] Such rules are "typically introduced by authoritarian governments in order to gain more control over their citizens," said a spokeswoman for Nord Security, provider of NordVPN, which has stopped operating its servers in India. "If democracies follow the same path, it has the potential to affect people's privacy as well as their freedom of speech," she said [...] Other VPN services that have stopped operating servers in India in recent months are some of the world's best known. They include U.S.-based Private Internet Access and IPVanish, Canada-based TunnelBear, British Virgin Islands-based ExpressVPN, and Lithuania-based Surfshark. ExpressVPN said it "refuses to participate in the Indian government's attempts to limit internet freedom." The government's move "severely undermines the online privacy of Indian residents," Private Internet Access said. "Customers in India will be able to connect to VPN servers in other countries," adds 9to5Mac. "This is the same approach taken in Russia and China, where operating servers within those countries would require VPN companies to comply with similar legislation." "Cloud storage services are also subjected to the new rules, though there would be little practical impact on Apple here. iCloud does not use end-to-end encryption, meaning that Apple holds a copy of your decryption key, and can therefore already comply with government demands for information."

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"Hyundai predictably fails in attempting to secure their car infotainment system with a default key lifted from programming examples," writes Slashdot reader sinij. "This level of security is unfortunately expected from auto manufacturers, who also would like to sell you always-connected Car2Car self-driving automobiles." Cryptographer and security experience Bruce Schneier writes: "Turns out the [AES] encryption key in that script is the first AES 128-bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A [PDF]," writes an unidentified developer under the name "greenluigi1." Luck held out, in a way. "Greenluigi1" found within the firmware image the RSA public key used by the updater, and searched online for a portion of that key. The search results pointed to a common public key that shows up in online tutorials like "RSA Encryption & Decryption Example with OpenSSL in C." Two questions remain: 1.) How did the test key get left behind? 2) Was it by accident or design?

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It's a free and open-source, cross-platform FTP application that allows secure file transfering — and it's making an old-school protocol cool again, according to a recent blog post. Started about 21 years ago — and downloaded by millions each year — FileZilla remains "committed to their role in liberating technology, by making it accessible, open and also secure," according to the blog post. But it also explains how FileZilla has beefed up that security through a collaboration with the internet freedom nonprofit, the Open Technology Fund (or "OTF"): Over the past year, FileZilla has utilised support from OTF to undertake two activities that enhanced and ensured the security of their tools. The first was integrating FileZilla Server with Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open source certificate authority that ensures secure communication between the two end-points sending or receiving a file via FileZilla.... Secondly, FileZilla ran a penetration test, a service offered by OTF's Red Team Lab. A team of independent researchers attempted to force access to the FileZilla server to see if they could gain control. These researchers were highly skilled, and the testing was extensive. The team conducting the test only found very minor security vulnerabilities that FileZilla were able to fix immediately. As a result of this process, anyone wanting to use the FileZilla software can trust that it has been cross-scrutinised by a third party and found to be secure.... FileZilla respects users' confidentiality: they do not track your behaviour, nor sell your data to other companies. While they do have advertisements on their website, they are posted exactly as advertisements would be posted in a newspaper. Nobody knows that you are reading the advertisements, or that you decided to call or connect to the advertised website. The advertisement has simply been attached to the webpage, without any underlying tracking.... . "Our mission hasn't changed in over 20 years: design, develop, maintain and enhance free tools to securely transfer files with ease and reliability," said Tim Kosse, FileZilla Lead Developer. This decision was a political one taken by FileZilla, to always preserve the freedom of their tools, and of their users. "We aren't the typical commercial open-source venture that starts doing things for free, and over time, closes this and that to make money" said Roberto Galoppini, FileZilla Director of Strategy. "While you might not see FileZilla listed at the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] any time soon, the freedom of our tools will never be questioned...." [I]f you work in an industry that requires the secure transfer of sensitive files, or if you simply have personal photographs or videos you want to keep confidential, using proprietary platforms to share or store them can put your information at risk of being exposed.... FileZilla offers an alternative that is secure and private. Their tools are developed by a team that is deeply invested in protecting users' confidentiality, and liberating technology is central to their work and decision-making.... At the same time, projects like FileZilla remind us that there exists a global community of technologists, activists, coders, bloggers, journalists, software developers, and mindful internet users making internet freedom a lived reality and daily practice. Supporting, experimenting with and using free and open source tools, such as the FileZilla client and server, enables us to disinvest from the capitalist pursuit of corporate control of technology and unchecked surveillance of our data. Rather, we can step into alignment with an alternative, parallel narrative being created by a community of resistance that is grounded in principles of cooperation, solidarity, commons and openness.

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IoT Times brings an update on "the race to create a new set of encryption standards." Last month, it was announced that a specialized security algorithm co-authored by security experts of NXP, IBM, and Arm had been selected by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to become part of an industry global standard designed to counter quantum threats. IoT Times interviews the cryptography expert who co-created the Crystals-Kyber lattice-based algorithm selected by NIST — Joppe W. Bos, a senior principal cryptographer at the Competence Center for Cryptography and Security at NXP Semiconductors. And what worries his colleagues at the semiconductor company isn't the "imminent threat of quantum computers," Bos says, but an even closer and more practical deadline: "the timeline for these post-quantum crypto standards." "Two weeks ago, NIST announced the winners of these new public standards, the post-quantum crypto standards, and their timeline is that in 2024, so in roughly two years, the winners will be converted into standards. And as soon as the standards are released, our customers will expect NXP Semiconductors, as one of the leaders in crypto and security, to already have support for these standards, because we are, of course, at the start of the chain for many end products. Our secure elements, our secure platforms, SOCs, are one of the first things that need to be integrated into larger platforms that go into end products. Think about industrial IoT. Think about automotive applications. So, our customers already expect us to support post-quantum crypto standards in 2024, and not only support but, for many companies, being able to compute the functional requirements of the standard. "It took over ten years to settle down on the best methods for RSA and ECC, and now we have a much shorter timeline to get ready for post-quantum crypto." "When you ask the experts, it ranges from one to five decades until we can see quantum computers big enough to break our current crypto," Bos says in the interview. So he stresses that they're not driven by a few of quantum computers. "The right question to ask, at least for us at NXP is, when is this new post-quantum crypto standard available? Because then, our customers will ask for post-quantum support, and we need to be ready. "The standard really drives our development and defines our roadmap." But speaking of the standard's "functional requirements", in the original story submission Slashdot reader dkatana raised an interesting point. There's already billions of low-powered IoT devices in the world. Will they all have the memory and processing power to use this new lattice-based encryption?

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Between 1850 and 1855, someone published a series of unusual ads in the British newspaper The Times. They were made up of a series of seemingly random letters, apparently gobbledygook. An anonymous reader adds: Almost 200 years later, a group of codebreakers has finally been able to decrypt some of them and read what they said, discovering that they were actually encrypted messages from a rescue expedition in the Arctic Ocean.

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The U.K. government has tabled an amendment (PDF) to the Online Safety Bill that could put it on a collision course with end-to-end encryption. TechCrunch reports: It's proposing to give the incoming internet regulator, Ofcom, new powers to force messaging platforms and other types of online services to implement content-scanning technologies, even if their platform is strongly encrypted -- meaning the service/company itself does not hold keys to decrypt and access user-generated content in the clear. The home secretary, Priti Patel, said today that the governments wants the bill to have greater powers to tackle child sexual abuse. "Child sexual abuse is a sickening crime. We must all work to ensure criminals are not allowed to run rampant online and technology companies must play their part and take responsibility for keeping our children safe," she said in a statement -- which also offers the (unsubstantiated) claim that: "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive -- we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers." The proposed amendment is also being targeted at terrorism content -- with the tabled clause referring to: "Notices to deal with terrorism content or CSEA [child sexual exploitation & abuse] content (or both)." These notices would allow Ofcom to order a regulated service to use "accredited" technology to identify CSEA or terrorism content which is being publicly shared on their platform and "swiftly" remove it. But the proposed amendment goes further -- also allowing Ofcom to mandate that regulated services use accredited technical means to prevent users from encountering these types of (illegal) content -- whether it's being shared publicly or privately via the service, raising questions over what the power might mean for E2E encryption.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the decade since larger-than-life character Kim Dotcom founded Mega, the cloud storage service has amassed 250 million registered users and stores a whopping 120 billion files that take up more than 1,000 petabytes of storage. A key selling point that has helped fuel the growth is an extraordinary promise that no top-tier Mega competitors make: Not even Mega can decrypt the data it stores. On the company's homepage, for instance, Mega displays an image that compares its offerings to Dropbox and Google Drive. In addition to noting Mega's lower prices, the comparison emphasizes that Mega offers end-to-end encryption, whereas the other two do not. Over the years, the company has repeatedly reminded the world of this supposed distinction, which is perhaps best summarized in this blog post. In it, the company claims, "As long as you ensure that your password is sufficiently strong and unique, no one will ever be able to access your data on MEGA. Even in the exceptionally improbable event MEGA's entire infrastructure is seized!" (emphasis added). Third-party reviewers have been all too happy to agree and to cite the Mega claim when recommending the service. Research published on Tuesday shows there's no truth to the claim that Mega, or an entity with control over Mega's infrastructure, is unable to access data stored on the service. The authors say that the architecture Mega uses to encrypt files is riddled with fundamental cryptography flaws that make it trivial for anyone with control of the platform to perform a full key recovery attack on users once they have logged in a sufficient number of times. With that, the malicious party can decipher stored files or even upload incriminating or otherwise malicious files to an account; these files look indistinguishable from genuinely uploaded data. After receiving the researchers' report privately in March, Mega on Tuesday began rolling out an update that makes it harder to perform the attacks. But the researchers warn that the patch provides only an "ad hoc" means for thwarting their key-recovery attack and does not fix the key reuse issue, lack of integrity checks, and other systemic problems they identified. With the researchers' precise key-recovery attack no longer possible, the other exploits described in the research are no longer possible, either, but the lack of a comprehensive fix is a source of concern for them. "This means that if the preconditions for the other attacks are fulfilled in some different way, they can still be exploited," the researchers wrote in an email. "Hence we do not endorse this patch, but the system will no longer be vulnerable to the exact chain of attacks that we proposed." Mega has published an advisory here. However, the chairman of the service says that he has no plans to revise promises that the company cannot access customer data.

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Swiss-based encrypted email provider ProtonMail today announced a restructuring of its privacy-first services, bringing them under a new unifying brand name: Proton. "Today, we are undertaking our biggest step forward in the movement for an internet that respects your privacy. The new, updated Proton offers one account, many services, and one privacy-by-default ecosystem. You can now enjoy unified protection with a modernized look and feel. Evolving into a unified Proton reflects our growth from an end-to-end encrypted email provider to an entire privacy ecosystem, allowing us to deliver even more benefits to the Proton community and make privacy accessible to everyone," the company said. MacRumors adds: Previously, users could only subscribe to each service the company offered individually. Going forward, the new Proton offers one account to access all the services offered in the company's privacy-by-default ecosystem, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive, all of which can be accessed from proton.me. All Proton services remain available as a free tier, with more advanced features and more storage available via paid plans. The free Proton tier includes up to 1GB of storage and one Proton email address, as well as access to Proton's encrypted Calendar and VPN services. Further reading: Proton Is Trying to Become Google -- Without Your Data.

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The US is readying new encryption standards that will be so ironclad that even the nation's top code-cracking agency says it won't be able to bypass them. From a report: The National Security Agency has been involved in parts of the process but insists it has no way of bypassing the new standards. "There are no backdoors," said Rob Joyce, the NSA's director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, in an interview. A backdoor enables someone to exploit a deliberate, hidden flaw to break encryption. An encryption algorithm developed by the NSA was dropped as a federal standard in 2014 amid concerns that it contained a backdoor. The new standards are intended to withstand quantum computing, a developing technology that is expected to be able to solve math problems that today's computers can't. But it's also one that the White House fears could allow the encrypted data that girds the U.S. economy -- and national security secrets -- to be hacked.

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